Devin Coldewey, Author at TechCrunch

‘AI-powered’ ad ignites creator controversy on Instagram

Devin Coldewey — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 19:39:59 +0000

A new ad from Under Armour featuring boxer Anthony Joshua has come under fire from creatives on Instagram after its director claimed it as the “first Ai-powered sports commercial” — but critics in the industry say it blatantly reused others’ work without credit as part of an AI hype cycle cash grab. Director Wes Walker […]

Microbiome startups respond as industry is accused of ‘questionable practices’

Devin Coldewey — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 18:13:54 +0000

The biotech sector has embraced the microbiome in recent years, a green field market powered by cheap genome sequencing and venture dollars, promising bespoke treatments for everything from gut troubles to skin problems. But a report in Science alleges that these companies lack scientific rigor and meaningful regulation, offering little more than guesswork on a […]

Google DeepMind trains a video game-playing AI to be your co-op companion

Devin Coldewey — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 14:01:25 +0000

AI models that play games go back decades, but they generally specialize in one game and always play to win. Google DeepMind researchers have a different goal with their latest creation: a model that learned to play multiple 3D games like a human, but also does its best to understand and act on your verbal […]

AI2 Incubator scores $200M in compute to feed needy AI startups

Devin Coldewey — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 19:30:45 +0000

AI2 Incubator, spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured a windfall $200 million in compute that startups going through its program can take advantage of to accelerate early development. “Our community of hundreds of AI practitioners are desperate for compute,” said managing director Jacob Colker. “A lot of these startups […]

Saildrone’s first aluminum Surveyor autonomous vessel splashes down for Navy testing

Devin Coldewey — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 22:32:56 +0000

Ocean intelligence company Saildrone has just put the first of a new generation of Surveyor autonomous vessels in the water: an aluminum version that the Navy is keen to take advantage of. But don’t worry — they aren’t putting guns on them. Founder and CEO Richard Jenkins told TechCrunch that the demand for vessels like […]

Roku disables TVs and streaming devices until users consent to new terms

Devin Coldewey — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:51:01 +0000

Roku users around the country turned on their TVs this week to find an unpleasant surprise: The company required them to consent to new dispute resolution terms in order to access their device. The devices are unusable until the user agrees. Users (at least, this user) received an email the day before saying that “we […]

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker scorns anti-encryption efforts as ‘parochial, magical thinking’

Devin Coldewey — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 20:51:45 +0000

AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker. But it’s not all bad news. (Actually, it is all bad news, because I wrote up the good news separately.) Speaking onstage with me […]

Why Signal ‘turned our architecture inside out’ for its latest privacy feature

Devin Coldewey — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 20:25:55 +0000

Adding usernames to a messaging app may seem like a standard feature, but for Signal, such identifiers were anathema to its mission of total privacy and security — until now. The upcoming 7.0 version adds usernames, but the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker, explained that this was nowhere near as simple a decision as it may […]

Rabbit’s Jesse Lyu on the nature of startups: ‘Grow faster, or die faster,’ just don’t give up

Devin Coldewey — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 22:43:17 +0000

Rabbit co-founder and CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t afraid of death … the death of the company, at least. He told TechCrunch that the company is a startup whose fortunes may be swayed by the whims of multibillion-dollar rivals — but that’s no reason to give up and go home. Appearing onstage at StrictlyVC LA, Lyu […]

Syrenna’s WaterDrone is the ocean-monitoring ‘underwater weather station’ of the future

Devin Coldewey — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 15:01:13 +0000

As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface. Syrenna has built a versatile robotic platform that you might think of as a mobile weather station for the sea, and is ready to emerge from stealth to enable precise, real-time […]

AIs serve up ‘garbage’ to questions about voting and elections

Devin Coldewey — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 23:36:52 +0000

A number of major AI services performed poorly in a test of their ability to address questions and concerns about voting and elections. The study found that no model can be completely trusted, but it was bad enough that some got things wrong more often than not. The work was performed by Proof News, a […]

This Week in AI: Addressing racism in AI image generators

Devin Coldewey — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 14:45:12 +0000

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, Google paused its AI chatbot Gemini’s […]

‘Embarrassing and wrong’: Google admits it lost control of image-generating AI

Devin Coldewey — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 21:01:55 +0000

Google has apologized (or come very close to apologizing) for another embarrassing AI blunder this week, an image-generating model that injected diversity into pictures with a farcical disregard for historical context. While the underlying issue is perfectly understandable, Google blames the model for “becoming” oversensitive. But the model didn’t make itself, guys. The AI system […]

Stable Diffusion 3 arrives to solidify early lead in AI imagery against Sora and Gemini

Devin Coldewey — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 19:12:00 +0000

Stability AI has announced Stable Diffusion 3, the latest and most powerful version of the company’s image-generating AI model. While details are scant, it’s clearly an attempt to fend off the hype around recently announced competitors from OpenAI and Google. We’ll have a more technical breakdown of all this soon, but for now you should […]

Hundreds of AI luminaries sign letter calling for anti-deepfake legislation

Devin Coldewey — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 20:17:35 +0000

Hundreds in the artificial intelligence community have signed an open letter calling for strict regulation of AI-generated impersonations, or deepfakes. While this is unlikely to spur real legislation (despite the House’s new task force), it does act as a bellwether for how experts lean on this controversial issue. The letter, signed by more than 500 […]

House punts on AI with directionless new task force

Devin Coldewey — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 22:53:07 +0000

The House of Representatives has founded a Task Force on artificial intelligence that will “ensure America continues leading in this strategic area,” as Speaker Mike Johnson put it. But the announcement feels more like a punt after years of indecision that show no sign of ending. In a way this task force — chaired by […]

No ‘GPT’ trademark for OpenAI

Devin Coldewey — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 21:05:25 +0000

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has denied OpenAI’s attempt to trademark “GPT,” ruling that the term is “merely descriptive” and therefore unable to be registered. It’s a blow to OpenAI’s branding, but don’t expect its competitors to start releasing their own version of the ubiquitous chatbot. ChatGPT is certainly the most recognizable brand in […]

Largest text-to-speech AI model yet shows ’emergent abilities’

Devin Coldewey — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 23:19:04 +0000

Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits “emergent” qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. These models were always going to grow and improve, but the researchers specifically hoped to see […]

SpaceX will de-orbit 100 Starlink satellites with unidentified flaw

Devin Coldewey — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 18:01:21 +0000

SpaceX announced today that it will be sending some 100 Starlink satellites to an early retirement after a flaw was identified that could make them a worry later on. Don’t expect a fiery light show, though, and if you use Starlink, your service should be unaffected. The announcement explains that “the Starlink team identified a […]

US Patent Office: AI is all well and good, but only humans can patent things

Devin Coldewey — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 21:00:32 +0000

The question of where AI sits in the legal personhood stack isn’t as simple as it may seem (i.e. “nowhere”) — but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today declared that, as with other intellectual property, only a person can receive its official protections. The news arrived via “guidance,” which is to say official policy […]